Articles

I’ve been looking for a topic to start with the idea of a “City.” It is about either the people living or the stories happening in this city. It is not necessarily about the culture, art, fashion or food. Perhaps, I hope it could be a landmark architecture, a building that often sealed with the city’s past, present and future. 8 Spruce Street, or New York by Gehry, is a new landmark in New York City, not only it represents the city today, but it also symbolizes a brand new generation of the city.

In any place throughout the history, discrimination starting from birth has always been and still is an unsolved problem we continue to carry. The social inequality results mass outbreaks, which becomes the foundation of a revolution. The positive result of a revolution is the power to speak up about human rights and freedom. Yet, "freedom" after a revolution does not resolve the fundamental issue. Although it brings liberation from unfair restraints, it does not automatically bring freedom.

Polish artist, Miroslaw Balka’s project “How It Is,” simply offers a vast history of darkness, a layering of connections, concepts and facts, sources and references that are devoid of hierarchy and proper conjunctions of personal and historical memory.

Sound artist Christine Sun Kim utilizes the medium of sound through technology to explore her relationship with sound and her language. Kim expresses the sound she finds in her world in variety of forms: drawing, performance, installation and collaboration. Perhaps, her definition of sound is unfamiliar to us, and different from the one that we listen, but it is the sound that belongs to her, a true world of sound.

Dear artists, have you thought about why do you make the art that you make today? Maybe we just choose the way we feel and the things we make determines on the world that we live in today.

Last Friday, there was an attack in Paris. I cannot help thinking why so many things are going wrong in this world. We know we must do something to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often don't know how - wars repeat, killing continues, people work long hours and spend less time with loved ones, the earth's environment is in crisis and we do very little to fix the problem, the message we receive on the streets is mostly about "buy this and buy that," we consume more, yet not fulfilled.

When I was a child, I used to be crazy about collecting flower seeds. I wonder why the flower seeds were so attractive to a 6-year-old girl. Maybe, as human being, it's our instinct to love and appreciate the creation of nature. That kind of love is pure, without any desire, and expect nothing in return. When I saw the works of Wolfgang Laib, a serene presence and a reductive beauty, my childhood memories popped up surely and clearly. As we get older, with too many attractions from the society, the pure love and appreciation of ordinary life is fading away. Now we are always looking for a reason to love. If we lose the ability to find the ordinary beauty in nature and life, then what kind of art are we celebrating today?

Time and distance does not change a person no matter how far or how long he/she is away from own country. Lou references Dvorak's Symphony No.9 “From The New World” to discuss her opinion. The symphony is dedicated to America by a Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, and he composed the symphony after moving to New York and thinking about his own country. Lou also discusses how she learned the importance of homeland from her own father.

What could exist before there was time or without time? Even to think about The Big Bang, the creation of our universe, could it have happened before there was time? Without time, how could anything can have any kind of movement or transformation? This week, and maybe from time-to-time, I want to write a little bit about time.

“The mirror is like a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not… It’s an ‘unreal’ space. Also, the mirror is a heteropia as the mirror does exist in reality. It makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real and absolutely unreal.”